Voting Ethically – A Vote of Confidence for the World’s Poor

Unfortunately I haven’t had the chance to write a lengthy blog about the issue of voting ethically (the election has come around way too fast!) but I still wanted to write something that will point you in the direction of a great resource and article and help you vote ethically this Saturday.

The best resource I’ve found this week thanks to Make Poverty History Australia is the Make Poverty History Election 2010 Scorecard. You can visit their website article to read more about it and download the scorecard. The scorecard assesses the three major parties, Liberal, Labor and The Greens in regards to their five calls for action:

Do our fair share for the Millennium Development Goals – accelerate growth in the aid program and commit to 0.7% of GNI to aid

Further improve the focus and quality of Australia’s aid and do our share to meet the MDGS

Take a leadership position in the global fight against climate change

Ensure food for all

Provide greater global leadership in development negotiations.

It definitely provides some interesting insights into party policies and priorities!

Secondly, if you’re still not convinced after checking out the scorecard, read Tim Costello’s response to the mundane oddities that the media is focusing on in this campaign. He encourages us to not only think locally when we vote, but globally too.

Tim also appeared on this week’s episode of Insight; ‘End Game’ which saw him discussing policies that parties should be debating. You can view the episode’s transcript and video online here. Both Tim and the other panellists provided much food for thought before we vote on Saturday!

I hope these two resources prove useful to you, and encourage you to not just give a vote to your local party member, yet rather give a vote of confidence to the 1.4 billion people living in poverty by sending them the message that: YES – we care about your condition, and we do want a government that cares about foreign policy and international development.